St Lucia Community Garden

 Hello, SLCG Members and Friends

Welcome to a brand new website for the St Lucia Community Garden (the old one was proving increasingly unreliable), to reflect the steps we are taking to move toward independence from the St Lucia Community Association, who had the concept for our project and then the drive and the patience to get us here. 

It’s been a few weeks since we had practical news for you about the Community Garden, mostly because we were waiting for delivery of Phase 2’s build programme, but if you have been checking out our St Lucia Community Garden Facebook Group (sign up there for email notifications), or have passed by the CG site you’ll have noticed lots of action and major changes since last week.

Council’s groundworks contractor has at last completed the lower "Growing Terrace" walls and build, added a permanent, stable working surface to both Terraces and created a simple path to Hillstone’s carpark. We didn’t have quite enough cash from our second generous grant from Cr Mackay and Walter Taylor Ward to achieve all wall length we wanted, but there’s more than enough done now for us to get going as community gardeners.

Which means crucial above ground preparations for us to deliver as well:

 

Compost

You may have already seen the new closed Compost Hubs (built for the CG to use by Council). We are building open bays for bulk green and brown materials right next door to the Hub bins. We are also looking forward to the imminent installation of our six public-facing black plastic bins by Council, for members of the public (as well as Garden Members) to contribute their vegetable-based kitchen waste to.  We’ll lay out a lot more about what people can (and definitely can’t) recycle as Garden compost via the black bins once they are in place.

Core tasks

As soon as we have our public liability insurance in place, we will sort some other chores we need sorted before we can start actual gardening.  We already have a donated tools shed arriving next week. It needs painting, putting together and then erecting (all planned for the week starting 12.10.20)), we are getting in quotes for an on-site water tank (to be paid for out of Members' fees), and will be building the upper, Learning Terrace, raised garden beds during October.

Meanwhile, the SLCG Launch Committee has been working on some of the inevitable admin:

• applying for additional grant funding
• sourcing in-kind funding for tools and materials
• researching and buying the best public liability insurance for Members and helpers
• getting BCC permission (as Land Manager) to use the site as a Community Garden
• drafting our SLCG Membership Rules and the Constitution for the SLCG
• preparing the St Lucia Community Garden Association for formal independent incorporation.

So, plenty of jobs for everybody that can to get their teeth into, and at last pretty much happening now! Practical tasks like shed painting and construction next week, helping get the admin and Committee sorted out asap, spreading the word to friends and neighbours and groups like P&Cs, or helping out with transport, tools and compost making. If you can chip in time and effort, or would like to help out some other way, do write to stluciacommunitygarden@gmail.com and get your hands on!